Reflections in a Rippling Glass: Classical & Contemporary Chinese Poems (The Poetry of China‪)‬

Nearly all contemporary American poets and readers of poetry are aware of the deathless art China has given the world, mostly through the renderings of Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Arthur Waley, Kenneth Rexroth, A.C. Graham, and others. In the early 20th century, when so much of our poetry was overdecorated and false with Victorian sentimentalities, the clean and spare imagery of the classical Tang and Song poets Li Bai, Du Fu, Wang Wei, and Su Dong Po came like a crisp north wind, clearing the air. The natural compression of the Chinese character, though in some ways misunderstood by Pound, became a model for Imagism, the poetic ideal whose notes still ring through our aesthetic. Pound translated these poems mostly in open form, precisely what American poetry needed, even if the Chinese originals were far more formal. Such are the vagaries of cultural borrowing, and translation itself. At any rate, the influence of this work has been immeasurable. It's inseparable from what our poetry has become.